Aziz Ansari is a comedian and actor and he’s just written his first book, Modern Romance. I was about to dismiss it as another off-the-cuff, breezy autobiography that comedians tend to write – but it’s not that at all! It’s a real book. Based on research, and a little bit of science in the humanities. Crazy!Continue reading →

I don’t come from a political background or family, but I’m participating in the upcoming Canadian election like never before. I’m volunteering for a political party (full disclosure: Liberals), I’m obsessively researching MPs and their records, and I’m even reading books about the state of Canadian politics.Continue reading →

A couple years ago I saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Unbelievers. She was well spoken in this documentary about science and reason, and I was intrigued by the circumstances that led her to reject her religion, Islam. I recently finished her first autobiography Infidel where she explores this topic in-depth.Continue reading →

Finishing a book was a struggle in the past three months. I put down four of the ten books I tried to read, which is rare for me. Many books I chose just didn’t live up to their hype. This post features only two non-fiction books I enjoyed recently – however, on the plus side, it’s an opportunity to explain why I loved them! The books cover two extreme topics, so get ready for death and happiness.

She hits many of the main problems I’ve experienced with surveys: people are not good at reporting what they like or don’t like, people can’t accurately predict their future behaviour, and not everything can be measured on a rating scale. To truly understand what customers are doing and their preferences you have to (gasp!) sit down and observe them.

Customer satisfaction is useless

The article also discusses the issues with tracking customer satisfaction scores. Erika suggests that businesses should be looking at more specific metrics that are tied to habits:

I want everyone to see customer loyalty for what it is — habit. And to be more successful creating loyalty, you need to measure the things that build habit.

“Based on experience of which companies stuck with us and which didn’t, we decided that any team that has exchanged 2,000 messages in its history has tried Slack — really tried it,” Butterfield says. “It hit us that, regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack today.”

As soon as you have those numbers enshrined at your company, you can start working on innovative ways to move people toward those milestones — whether it’s email reminders, or prompting them to take new actions in the product. Because Slack knows 2,000 is its golden number, it can iterate on ways to get customers across that line.

This is a great example of how a specific customer habit can drive better decisions. User research comes in many forms, but the best research is specific, meaningful, and tied directly to what people are doing.

Spotify’s new look is making its rounds on the internet, but one of the fascinating parts of the rollout is the problem they identified with authoring photos. Spotify has thousands of photos of bands from around the world, all with a different look-and-feel, and they needed a way to bring these photos easily into the site without taking away from their own brand. Fast Company’s article describes their solution – a custom editing tool that allows distributed authors to create duotone images:

The duotone look became so much a part of the brand identity, that Brett Renfer, Collins’s director of experience design, created a software program (subsequently nicknamed, “The Colorizer”) to automate the process—a critical issue for a company like Spotify which has designers across 58 markets, from Andorra to Uruguay, all scrambling to brand content with the Spotify look.

Companies tend to stay away from developing custom apps for authoring content, but investing in a tool can help a network of people save time and maintain content consistency. It’s a small detail, but this one will have huge benefits.

Check out the full article and 30 second video that highlights the Colorizer app.

I could’ve pulled more quotes, but this one I love because it describes his leadership style, and being totally open to design failures:

Ive describes his role as lying between two extremes of design leadership: he is not the source of all creativity, nor does he merely assess the proposals of colleagues. The big ideas are often his, and he has an opinion about every detail. Team meetings are held in the kitchen two or three times a week, and Ive encourages candor. “We put the product ahead of anything else,” he said. “Let’s say we’re talking about something that I’ve done that’s ugly and ill-proportioned—because, believe you me, I can pull some beauties out of the old hat. . . . It’s fine, and we all do, and sometimes we do it repeatedly, and we have these seasons of doing it—”